Be Not Far from Me(26)

Davey Beet told me once to call for him if I got lost.

So I try it.

I call for him again and again, losing volume as I go, his hat a filthy ball in my hands that I’ve been kneading at in my pain. I move on from Davey to my dad, and I even try God and Jesus, but nobody shows.

There’s nobody here but me, so I’ve got to sit up and do what needs to be done. I get onto my elbows and let the wave of black in my vision settle before going the rest of the way up, leaning forward to see what’s left of my foot.

Somehow, someway, I got it just right.

Everything’s cut off clean as a whistle. I take what’s left of my shirt and soak it in whiskey, then bandage my foot. It burns again, bright and sharp, but I’ve already been through it and know what to expect. I take a deep breath and lie back for a minute until it passes. Then I undo the tourniquet and watch the bandage soak through with blood.

I’m fading fast, so I take another oxy and a swig of whiskey, followed by water. I got it into my head that maybe if I drink enough the alcohol will chase the infection right out of my veins. I doubt that’s good medical advice, but I also don’t give much of a shit as I crawl through my own blood to the mattress. All I want is sleep, and the comfort of my moldy blanket.

A patch of sun is coming through the window onto the mattress. I lay in it, my head fuzzy and the pain very much still there but somehow less important than it was a minute before. I don’t know if I’m dying or getting better, but I do know that I put Davey Beet’s hat back on, so I put my hands on both sides of my head and curl into a ball.

There’s no kick left in me.

I am a dying animal, alone in the sun.

I am the deer skull I found forever ago, beside the trail.

I am so very tired.

My limbs are concrete and the mattress water; I feel as if I’m sinking into it. Either that or I’m water and the mattress is solid, because every time I shift it’s like the movement keeps on going even once my body stops, the bed the only thing keeping me from becoming pure liquid and dripping right out the door.

Like water I’d search for a low point, slipping down the ridge and into the little stream at the bottom, joining a creek and then a river. I’d slide past my hometown and maybe see Duke fishing off the bridge, and then I’d go on out to sea, all my pain and everything, until I am a single drop in the ocean.

I’m not okay and I know it, but there’s a sense of calm in being high, like all my troubles are balloons floating just above me and now that I’m awake enough I can pull them down one at a time for examination.

First there’s the pain, a shiny red balloon full to bursting. The oxy didn’t make it go away, for sure. I can still feel it, hot and bright, but it’s not the first thing on my mind. It’s someone else’s problem, a confidence whispered by a friend that made me feel bad for them but left behind in a rush when I take off for a run. My pain is something to be remembered later, when it occurs to me.

Duke is a blue balloon, half-deflated, hovering somewhere over my face like a moth that can’t decide whether to land in the fire. Now that I’m not worried about dying—not that it won’t happen, I’m just not worried about it anymore—I can’t stop thinking about him and Natalie, the sound he made that I thought was for my ears alone.

Exposed bone and sliced nerves I can ignore, but even the oxy can’t touch how it feels when I remember finding them. It hurts. More than taking off a piece of my own body, even. I wave that balloon away, not able to deal with it yet. My hand keeps going, all coordination lost, and bounces off the side of the camper to fall back across my face. Davey’s hat is scratchy against my wrist and soaked with sweat. I pull it off but keep it nearby, convinced that I smell a bit of him in it.

There’s a white balloon up there too, one with a string so long I didn’t notice it until I moved. It’s up against the roof, so high above me I can’t imagine what problem I’ve got that it could be so far from me and still cause issues.

Then I realize it’s my momma.

She wrote me a letter once. Dad kept it for a few weeks, debating about whether to give it to me. It wasn’t him that made the decision but a raccoon that snuck into the trailer and trashed the place, leaving bits of dinner, his own shit, and pieces of our mail everywhere. I found the letter from Mom in the kitchen sink next to a chewed chunk of Colby cheese he’d drug out of the trash and a half-full can of beer (I don’t know if Dad drank that or the coon did).

Momma told me in her letter that she wished she could say that leaving me was the hardest thing she ever did, but it wasn’t. She said it was an easy decision, because I didn’t need her. Dad did, she said—maybe too much. And leaving him wasn’t that hard of a call because you get tired of picking up a grown man’s socks, but whenever she tried to brush my hair for me I just yelped and told her to leave me alone.

She said she always wanted a girl, but what she got was me.

I didn’t know what to make of that, so I folded it up and kept it under my pillow for a while, looking at her writing to see if there were any of her whirls and loops in mine. But there wasn’t. My letters were all hard angles and dark slashes, like Dad’s, and who cares if there’s socks on the floor, anyway?

Maybe I didn’t need her brushing my hair, but I guess I could’ve used a word of advice a time or two, like the first few times I got into fights with Duke, or even when things were going really well. Maybe even more then, come to think of it. She thought I didn’t need her, but I needed something more than just Duke’s mom reminding him to wear a condom. At least I had that though. She didn’t want him to get straddled with kids before twenty, but it would’ve been my ass too, and maybe she didn’t want to see me living somewhere with a nice-enough basement but a man who came home and made everything quieter than church.